There is no other way to put this — our current president, Donald Trump, is determined to do everything he can to undermine the rule of law in the United States.
His specific reasons for all this remain murky but seem to have everything to do with making Trump more wealthy, dismantling the social safety net that this country has built over decades, and ensuring that Republican dominance over federal agencies and apparatus is never again threatened by a resurgent party known as the Democrats.
It really is that simple.
And so is he.
He never wanted this job in the first place, as attentive news readers will recall. He never expected to be elected, and was more surprised than just about anyone else when he was.
All he really hoped to get out of his campaign for the presidency was sufficient added notoriety to allow him to put together a new television network focused on himself as its main protagonist.
In truth, Trump wanted to be the owner of a network that would take up where the Fox television empire leaves off, a network that would give him the kind of bully pulpit he craves; one that would give free rein to every idiotic impulse or idea he could come up with, without any filters such as a commitment to truth, factual verification and social betterment for the nation as a whole.
Given last weekend’s Trump-Twitter rants, it seemed clear that if he owned such a network, it would immediately hire any disgraced, discredited personality that Fox chose to dismiss or curtail, such as Judge Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson, whose racism, bigotry and misogyny proved to be too much for even the Fox management to swallow.
Trump is no Republican, nor is he a Democrat, though he has bounced between the parties as it’s suited his moods and politics.
Rather, he is a hater of government, always has been since he first began using his father’s money to make his way in the world of business. He hates government because it is an easy target, an easy scapegoat to blame for his frustrated enrichment schemes, his multiple bankruptcies, his preference for cheating people who do work for him rather than pay them what they are due.
It’s all there in the record for anyone who cares to look. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for Trump) his “base” of supporters, that bunch branded as “deplorables” by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, do not want to look at the facts, they simply act out of their biases and hatreds, the same as he does.
I write this after a week in which Trump has blatantly misused a federal regulation, known as the National Emergencies Act, a 1976 law ostensibly designed to permit a president to act swiftly to remedy a situation that the nation at large views as a threat to our national security.
But the problem in our current circumstance is that the “emergency” that Trump claims to be addressing — border security along the U.S.-Mexico boundary — is entirely a fabrication. Trump has decided that he can exploit a rising tide of social bigotry and race hatred for his own benefit, which is the only kind of benefit he can acknowledge.
Toward that end he has demonized immigrants endlessly, following a pattern of prejudice that was apparent well before he ran for the presidency, has belittled the very government he was elected to lead for even tepid assistance to immigrants, has tried to convince everyone in the U.S. that the media is their worst enemy when, in fact, Trump himself is the worst internal enemy to ever be annointed by our broken political system.
The sheer volume of lies and evasions that come from Trump’s mouth and keyboard are too numerous to even begin to describe in one column. But they are out there for all to see.
I find myself particularly troubled by this whole “emergency declaration” gambit, which is so obviously aimed at emasculating Congress that it has given pause even to his own party’s stalwarts.
This is our president’s most blatant bid yet to pull at the strings that bind our government together in all its checks-and-balances glory, to unravel our federal ball of twine as much as he can in what even he believes will be a one-term presidency.
Our elected representatives need to hear from all of us who feel Trump’s actions and thinking are unacceptable, at best, in this one, singular political strategem. I noticed that our sole Republican senator, Cory Gardner, sided with Trump in last week’s Congressional rejection of his supposed “emergency,” while our Democratic senator, Michael Bennet, voted with the majority to rebuke Trump’s declaration.
Give Gardner’s office a call, write an email, do whatever suits your political nature, and let him know that his consituency is not happy and that he should find his spine, wherever it has hidden, and stand up to Trump’s bid to turn our country into just another despotic, dictatorial playground for him and his buddies.
Email at jbcolson51@gmail.com.